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Crushing humanity, one post at a time.
But, geez, life is tough, it's just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead.www.soundclick.com/teysha

Pop-Tart® found in drive D: Delete Kids? Y/n
Officially Noted By Agloco
Originally Posted by WC
"...but it was your assumption that assumed I made an assumption"
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
...you're not curious about anything outside of your close-minded, benighted blind ideology.

The mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, says he wonders whether a well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and natural-gas drilling is making his city shake. Just to be safe, he’s bought earthquake insurance.

“You lose your whole house, that’s your life savings, and if you have no money or no insurance to replace it, then what do you do?” Mayor Charles P. Sammarone said in a telephone interview today. “Information is needed to make the homeowner and the residents feel safe.”

There have been 11 earthquakes in this northeastern Ohio city since D&L Energy Inc. began injecting drilling brine, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing, 9,200 feet (2,804 meters) underground in December 2010. The strongest, magnitude 4.0, hit last week on New Year’s Eve.

Sammarone said he has asked the City Council to pass a resolution tonight supporting state Representative Robert F. Hagan, a city Democrat who has called for a moratorium on so- called fracking and injection-well activity “until we can conclude it’s safe.”

Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won’t be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will “gag” doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.

Pennsylvania is at the forefront in the debate over “fracking,” the process by which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water are blasted into rock to tap into the gas. Recent discoveries of great reserves in the Marcellus Shale region of the state prompted a rush to development, as have advancements in fracking technologies. But with those changes have come a number of concerns from citizens about potential environmental and health impacts from natural gas drilling.

There is good reason to be curious about exactly what’s in those fluids. A 2010 congressional investigation revealed that Halliburton and other fracking companies had used 32 million gallons of diesel products, which include toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, in the fluids they inject into the ground. Low levels of exposure to those chemicals can trigger acute effects like headaches, dizziness, and drowsiness, while higher levels of exposure can cause cancer.

Pennsylvania law states that companies must disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking fluids to any health professional that requests that information in order to diagnosis or treat a patient that may have been exposed to a hazardous chemical. But the provision in the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else—not even the person they’re trying to treat.

Fracking the eagle ford will never affect the edwards aquifer. There is no way the fractures will make their way through 5,000+ feet of different strata, and the casing is the most ridiculous cement you could imagine.

Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the fluid, which contains benzene and other dangerous chemicals, safely locked nearly a mile below water supplies. This view of the earth's underground geology is a cornerstone of the industry's argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment.

But the study, using computer modeling, concluded that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as "just a few years."

"Simply put, [the rock layers] are not impermeable," said the study's author, Tom Myers, an independent hydrogeologist whose clients include the federal government and environmental groups.

i can only hope all the people who did this are still around to drink that shit and get cancer from it

evolution will make it so that people will learn to benefit from the chemicals. in fact, the differences in propriatary frac fluids explains the forked development from humans to the greys and reptiles

nothing to see here...the oil/gas industry does a splendid job paroling itself..

New Fracking Research Disputes A Fundamental Industry Claim

A primary claim of the hydraulic fracking industry is that deeply buried rock layers will always seal and contain the dangerous chemicals that are injected thousands of feet underground.

But a new study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that fracking for natural gas under Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania may lead to harmful gas or liquids flowing upward and contaminating drinking-water supplies.

The study found that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania's natural gas fields are seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies. Although it found no evidence of fracking chemicals doing the same, the findings suggest that there are paths that would let hazardous gas or fluids flow up after drilling:

"The biggest implication is the apparent presence of connections from deep underground to the surface," Robert Jackson, a biology professor at Duke University and one of the study's authors, told ProPublica. "It's a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk."
The study supplements another recent study that used computer modeling to predict how fracking fluids would move over time and found that they could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

A new report on shale resources and hydraulic fracturing from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress—concludes that fracking poses serious risks to health and the environment. The report, which reviewed studies from state agencies overseeing fracking as well as scientific reports, found that the extent of the risks has not yet been fully quantified and that there are many unanswered questions and a lack of scientific data.

Major reports and studies were also released in Europe the past two months, all of which came to the conclusion that fracking poses serious risks to water, public health, and the environment, and that additional scientific study is necessary. Meanwhile, in NY hundreds2 of doctors, scientists, and medical organizations have renewed calls for an independent, comprehensive health impact assessment and additional scientific research.

“The big-money gas industry is at it again,” said John Armstrong of Frack Action on behalf of New Yorkers Against Fracking, a broad coalition of New Yorkers opposed to fracking. “Rather than allow a comprehensive independent health assessment that can study the dangers fracking poses to our water and health, they just want to frack as quickly as possible and take their profits back to Texas.”

Given the conclusions from the broad NY, U.S., and world-wide scientific and medical community that fracking poses serious public health and environmental risks and needs further scientific study, the gas industry and the Joint Landowners Coalition’s rush to frack is dangerously reckless and irresponsible.

The giveaway that fracking was bad for water, and that the industry knew it from the very beginning, was when the Repugs specifically exempted fracking from the Clean Water Act and blocked all fracking pollution research. Then the criminal liars and frauds said "no research has shown that fracking pollutes water". Corporate profit, public disease and death.

As the ozone rating in San Antonio continues its slow upward march, area officials are beginning to investigate whether oil and gas drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale has anything to do with it. But their efforts are fraught with complications. And they remain far from answers in what is sure to be a high-stakes debate over the environmental impact of one of the country’s newest and fastest-growing oil and gas development regions.

<snip>

That “big stick” is held by the Environmental Protection Agency. For years, San Antonio has touted itself as the largest American city that is in compliance with federal ozone standards, and therefore not subject to extra regulation and enforcement from the EPA. That will soon change. Today, San Antonio is violating the Clean Air Act based on its ozone scores, the highest of which are far above the maximum acceptable value of 75 parts per billion.

“The San Antonio region has really become much more of an interest for ozone problems than it ever was before,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University who studies the formation and control of air pollution. Not only have the region’s ozone levels started to increase, but the EPA also lowered its ozone standards from 85 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion in 2008, during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

San Antonio’s ozone uptick is relatively recent. The city’s ozone numbers dropped dramatically in the beginning of the last decade; in 2007, it was under the federal limit even during some of the hottest days of the summer. Starting in the late 2000s, ozone levels began to increase again — just as the first wells were being drilled in the Eagle Ford Shale, now a 400-mile swath of oil and gas production stretching from South Texas’ Mexico border all the way to East Texas, brushing the southern tip of the San Antonio metropolitan area.

That timing has not been lost on anyone. “I think that there can be and there might be impacts” of the oil and gas development, Bella said. This month, AACOG produced its first estimates of the Eagle Ford Shale’s emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOX), air pollutants that are the precursor components of ozone.

The numbers are very preliminary and have not been shared publicly. But they suggest that the oil and gas extraction-related activities in the Eagle Ford Shale result in dozens of tons of emissions of VOCs and NOX every day, according to AACOG’s estimates. Such emissions would be equivalent to as much as half of what’s emitted daily by the entire San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan region each day. During a recent health forum in San Antonio, AACOG officials suggested that Eagle Ford activities could increase the city’s ozone score by several parts per billion within the next decade.

<snip>

Spokesmen for the Texas Oil and Gas Association and the South Texas Energy & Economic Roundtable, which was established by the 11 largest operators in the Eagle Ford Shale, did not respond to requests for comment.

<snip>

Air pollution experts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which will soon review AACOG’s report and help with revisions, have their own thoughts on the matter. They don’t believe that the Eagle Ford Shale is a major cause of the ozone changes in San Antonio, based on the data they are monitoring.

TCEQ? now there's a totally politicized TX agency that can be counted on to protect the environment.

For some extremely foresightful reason, dickhead Cheney made sure his Halliburton and other frackers would be untouchable:

"You might wonder why the EPA has not limited or regulated fracking operations, in light of the combustible water, cancer-causing chemicals, and earthquake clusters.

The EPA might well have adopted significant national policies on fracking by now, had the practice not been made exempt from the main national environmental laws in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, an offspring of Dick Cheney’s secretive energy committee.

A newly released study of fracking in a small Wyoming town has found that common practices in the industry may have widespread impacts on drinking water – a conclusion in direct conflict to U.S. EPA and Yale University reports last year that no such evidence exists.

The latest study was conducted by scientists at Stanford University based on findings from hydraulic fracturing operations in Pavillion, Wyoming, population 231.

The findings were reached based on public records and were published in the latest edition of Environmental Science & Technology.

The Stanford study found a direct link between fracking operations near the town and underground sources of drinking water. The research cited such unsafe practices as the dumping of drilling and production fluids containing diesel fuel, high chemical concentrations in unlined pits, and a lack of adequate cement barriers to protect groundwater.